Tag Archives: failed system restore

So, I’m minding my own business, just getting ready for another seminar, setting up our one and only Windows laptop to our projector when Power Point decides to crap out. Reboots didn’t help and time was running short. No problem, right? Just roll back to a previous restore point and I should be fine. Well, that didn’t turn out to be true. I’m actually not that torqued that rolling back didn’t fix anything, I’m torqued that the rollback failed and the chose to wipe out all my other restore points!

I chose a restore point that was just before the last Microsoft update, thinking that may have been the culprit and knowing that everything worked fine the last time I used the laptop. However, the system restore failed with an “unspecified error” and told me I should disable my antivirus and try again. It then informed me it would have to undo the attempted restore. Ok, sure, why not? Here’s the fun part; the system restore got to the end of the rollback, failed and spit out an error that says something to the effect of “unable to rollback from system restore since the system restore did not complete correctly”. That’s genius! So, I have to rollback due to a failed restore, and simultaneously can’t rollback due to the same failed restore. Oh, and just for good measure, we’ll destroy all the other restore points that were there so that you can’t use any of those or attempt to do this again. Nice.

If you were wondering, the antivirus I run on this laptop is Microsoft Security Essentials, which apparently Microsoft System Restore doesn’t know how to interact with.

End of the world? No, we proceeded with our broken PowerPoint and showed our video clips outside of PowerPoint and lived without answers to all of our audience response slides. Once back home, I was able to uninstall and reinstall Office 2007 and get things working again (no, repair didn’t work). I also had an image I could have used to perform a bare metal restore, though I failed to bring it along on my external drive. It wouldn’t have mattered as I didn’t have an hour or two to wait for a bare metal restore. I have, however, managed to get the audience response system(the only reason we need to run PowerPoint on a Windows computer) working on Windows running on Parallels on two of our Macs, so I have multiple redundant systems moving forward.